Everything You Need To Know About My Experience, Open Source Summit Europe 2018

I remember those days when I was new to Open Source, and I was making new mentors, and new friends, I was following them on social media. One fine day, My feed was filled with beautiful countries they were visiting, and awesome people they are meeting in the conferences. My urge developed to participate in these conferences, I tried very hard to get into these conferences, but my luck was not with me. One day, I took courage and I asked about this one of my mentors. She laughed once and told me it’s not that hard, contribute in the community and speak about it in these conferences. After all, these conferences are meant to make new friends, learn new things and spread knowledge. This intrigued me and I started working hard and contributed to various open source communities. One fine day, I was going through my twitter feed and I came across the tweet by Women Who Code, that they are giving away ticket for Open Source Summit, Europe 2018. To be honest, I was not expecting any good result. After a few weeks, I got mail from Women Who Code that they had awarded Open Source ticket to me.

I was so excited and planned my trip to the UK. The Open Source Summit is from 22 October to 24 October in Edinburgh. I planned my trip and arrived three days early in London to get used to the time lag between UK and India. Also, London is on my bucket list, so it’s a wonderful opportunity for me to explore this beautiful and diverse city. I travel around the city and settled on the bus to reach the conference venue. Bus travel takes 12 hours from London to Edinburgh. This was the most beautiful experience ever I had on a bus journey. The UK is full of beautiful landscapes, I enjoyed my journey and finally, I reached Edinburgh.

I was super excited for the conference so I woke up early and head to the conference. I collected my badge from the conference venue. The day started with first-time attendee breakfast held in the convention centre.

I quickly grab my breakfast and was searching for someone whom I can break the ice. I met lots of awesome people who are attending this summit for the first time. Some of them were full-time open source contributor, and some of them was doing the full-time job. As a first-time attendee, some of them gave me some excellent tips which they heard from others, like plan out sessions you want to attend, use brella app (App for networking, you can reserve time with someone whom you want to meet. This was an awesome app I met some few people from the community.) to meet awesome people from the community, learn from them how they started and their learnings, etc.

After awesome breakfast, I attended a keynote by Jim Zemlin, Director Linux Foundation. He gave the overview about what open source is all about and various projects that were going in Linux Foundation ranging from blockchain, cloud computing, DevOps, to automotive. He briefed us about how the various tracks of OSS EU were going to be. He also discussed the diversity empowerment summit, how open source has grown over the years, etc. Then there was a line of speakers for the keynote. The keynote was interesting.

After the keynote, I went to sponsor showcase to interact with lots of Sponsors who had set up booths and collected some swags. Some of the sponsors also had a workshop in return of swags like a drone. If we leave swag for a moment, these workshops are really interesting and I learned that how developers life had gone easy due to tools made by the community. It was very interesting to explore so many open source organizations all under one roof and know about their projects and the awesome work that they are doing. After that, I attended next session on Machine Translation by Sunil Marthi. He explained about how he and his team built a German to English translator discussed the problem he faced. Next session I attended was scalable machine learning using kubeflow by Barbara Fusinska.

She discussed what is machine learning and deep learning? She discussed that how you can use kubernetes to train your algorithm using kubeflow. She also discussed how machine learning engineer, data scientist see any problems. She discussed what machine learning basic architecture is: algorithm choosing, model building and model choosing.

She also shared one fun quotes like “I invented the satellite and all I got was lousy t-shirt” — on scientist tshirt.

If you want to experiment with kubeflow, you can visit here:

The day ended with all attendee reception party at National Museum of Scotland. It was a beautiful place where you can explore the diversity of the natural world, world cultures, art, and design. All the people at Museum dressed in traditional clothes and playing traditional Scottish music. We were welcomed by the bagpiper musician, it was an unforgettable experience. The live performance by local people cheered up all the attendees. Also, they taught us their traditional Scottish dance. Here is one glimpse:

I met lots of people here, who are working on Linux Images and heard their experience in Open Source. They discussed how they started learning and contributed to OSS. It was an awesome night.

The second day started with the keynote on different topics. I attended the talk by Eric who is the co-founder of Vibrant Data on topic “Future of AI is Data”. He talked about how data gathered from various sources can be used to simulate the behaviour of people. After this keynote, I went to the mentoring session.

The mentoring session was organized to help people to understand how open source can help them in shaping their careers and how it can benefit the community. Also, if someone wants to learn new things than what is the best way to learn were discussed in this session. I met people from Linux Foundation who are contributing to kernel. They discussed that first they don’t have a computer so they bought one. At that time, there was no one to guide them so they start tinkering with their computers and this is how they learned. They motivated us how we can use the resources available to us and can learn and help the community. The community needs lots of awesome developers, who can help by making a world a better place. He told us what how the companies leveraging open source technologies to grow and how you can contribute to these projects and shape our career. In a nutshell, it was an awesome session led by awesome mentors. After this was a break, and I went to the sponsor showcase to interact with more people.

After this, I met my mentor/admin from FOSSASIA, Mario and Hong Phuc for lunch. I had a great time meeting both of them face to face. This is the organization where I did my GSOC (Google Summer Of Code) in one of their popular project called Badgeyay. Badgeyay provides an interface to event organizers for generating badges of events from concerts to conferences and meetups. After that, I attended the talk on NLP with Python by Barbara Fusinska. She discussed how to classify the text based on the content.

There were lots of awesome talks. It broadened my perspective about tech and pointed to the direction I should be going and also made me understand that there is a lot I still need to learn. I wish a lot of people from my community will get a chance like this. Attending events like this does not only motivate you to work harder but also builds new skills in you. I can’t thank Women Who Code enough for this for sponsoring my ticket for Open Source Summit.

Conclusion:

It was really inspiring to see different fields connected with open source. It’s time for all the people to contribute in the community and help each other to make a better tomorrow. The Open Source Summit was a very good learning experience for me. I met lots of amazing people who are building great projects and contributing in the community, made lots of good connections, motivated to contribute more in open source community. I had eaten awesome food, visited a beautiful historical city and made beautiful memories. I am extremely thankful to Women Who Code, Linux Foundation who made possible for me to attend this awesome Summit ❤️. Hoping to Visit again next year but this time as a speaker.

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